This chapter provides an overview of vegetarian and vegan practice from Ancient times to the beginning of the twentieth century. The first section focuses on the representation of Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and on the Aristotelian and Biblical depictions of the relationship between humans and non-human animals; the second explores Early Modern attitudes, including a discussion of the vegetarianism in More’s Utopia; the third offers readings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; the fourth details the emergence of the word ’vegetarian’ in the context of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

This chapter focuses on the fiction of women’s liberation and its representations of vegetarianism. The first part offers readings of the fiction of Brigid Brophy, a pioneer of the animal rights movement, and Isabel Colegate in the context of the British class system; the second uses several novels by North American writers (Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Alison Lurie) to offer a rethinking of Carol J. Adams’s theory of feminist-vegetarianism before suggesting the ways in which Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn helps us to link vegetarian/vegan theory with decolonial theory and practice.

Chapter 3 details the connection between the utopian novel and vegetarianism. It argues that vegetarianism plays an important role in the two most significant texts in the development of the genre in the late-nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. It suggests that while H. G. Wells’s conflicted personal views on vegetarianism means that the subject is treated with a marked ambivalence, ultimately benefiting the fiction, the wholehearted endorsement of vegetarianism in Bellamy’s Equality is one element amongst several that reduces the text to little more than didactic screed. Here the important connection between women’s writing and vegetarianism and veganism is brought to the fore in a discussion of the British writer Mrs George Corbett and the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Chapter 4 highlights the way in which vegetarianism may be understood as an alternative (to) religion. The first part of the chapter suggests that after 1962 vegetarianism is central to the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and that no proper understanding of that fiction can be obtained without first understanding Singer’s vegetarian epistemology. This stands in contrast to the traditional view which is that Singer’s vegetarianism was only a kind of sublimation of Jewish dietary laws. The second part of the chapter focuses on Graham Greene’s The Comedians, arguing that the vegetarianism of Mr and Mrs Smith, which appears at first to be only comic relief, comes to take on much greater significance since it emerges as a powerful kind of surrogate faith – the kind of faith that Brown, the narrator, has lost.

This chapter explores fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in the twin contexts of American writing after postmodernism and climate change. It argues that Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meat and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity both ultimately undermine the connection between individual agency and effective political action – the former because of its vacillating metamodernist sensibility, and the latter as a consequence of the author’s retreat to realism and undermining of character – but that Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, by gesturing towards a posthumanist perspective, intimates a way through the impasse.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of how this project fits into the broader categories of critical eating studies and critical animal studies. Through a reading of Byron’s The Corsair, it offers an example of some of the book’s central arguments: that the development of vegetarianism and veganism must be understood as the result of an east–west dialogic relationship rather than as a one-way process of cultural transmission; that religion will often be used to explain away an individual’s dietary choice; that the connections with gender of vegetarianism and veganism are more complicated than has often been suggested.

This chapter presents a variety of arguments against factory farming and explores arguments that question the status quo notion that animals belong in the category of edible beings.

In this chapter, we bring together a queer menagerie of LGBQTNB human lives, specifically in the form of a focus on veganism and animal rights, beauty influencers and ‘cruelty-free’ makeup, and the kink practice known as ‘pup play’. What unites this seemingly disparate group of topics is a focus on the consumption of animals as food for humans or as fodder for human fantasies, and the ways in which a consumerist logic provides a point of intersection between human and animal lives that is arguably oriented to the former, rather than the latter. Obviously, veganism, ‘cruelty-free’ makeup, and kink are not unique to LGBQTNB people. However, each of these three topics takes unique forms or play out in specific ways in the context of LGBQTNB people’s lives. In focusing on the specific forms that these three topics take in the context of LGBQTNB people’s lives, we are mindful in this chapter that whilst some of the practices that LGBQTNB people may engage in through their relationships with animals may take specific forms, they nonetheless sit in (and serve to reinforce) broader social contexts wherein anthropocentrism serves to centre human standpoints.

In this chapter, we bring together a queer menagerie of LGBQTNB human lives, specifically in the form of a focus on veganism and animal rights, beauty influencers and ‘cruelty-free’ makeup, and the kink practice known as ‘pup play’. What unites this seemingly disparate group of topics is a focus on the consumption of animals as food for humans or as fodder for human fantasies, and the ways in which a consumerist logic provides a point of intersection between human and animal lives that is arguably oriented to the former, rather than the latter. Obviously, veganism, ‘cruelty-free’ makeup, and kink are not unique to LGBQTNB people. However, each of these three topics takes unique forms or play out in specific ways in the context of LGBQTNB people’s lives. In focusing on the specific forms that these three topics take in the context of LGBQTNB people’s lives, we are mindful in this chapter that whilst some of the practices that LGBQTNB people may engage in through their relationships with animals may take specific forms, they nonetheless sit in (and serve to reinforce) broader social contexts wherein anthropocentrism serves to centre human standpoints.

The chapter argues that the general right to conscientious exemption in Canada should not be interpreted to be available only to religious people. This is for several reasons. First, the general right to conscientious exemption is available under the right to freedom of conscience under s 2(a) of the Canadian Charter and s 3 of the Quebec Charter. Albeit there are only a handful of cases on this right and even though the SCC has not unequivocally delivered a judgment on this, it is clear that the existing cases hold that freedom of conscience protects non-religious conscientious beliefs. Secondly, even though the general right to conscientious exemption arising under anti-discrimination statutes appears to be a privilege of only those with religious beliefs, it has been argued that this would violate the Canadian Charter guarantee of equality rights under s 15 and freedom of conscience under s 2(a). The appropriate remedy, for most of the anti-discrimination statutes, would be to read in conscience as a protected characteristic. This would entail that, in relation to all the rules of law which guarantee the general right to conscientious exemption, the right is not a privilege of those that object on the basis of a religious belief.

Chapter 1 explains a natural law understanding of cooperation with evil, uses it to develop an understanding of consumer boycotts, and applies this understanding to the question: What kinds of choices are appropriate with respect to the boycott of the meat industry proposed by vegetarians, vegans, and others? The chapter pays particular attention to the so-called threshold argument against consumer meat purchases.

Contemporary botany has witnessed an upheaval in its understanding of the electrophysiology, cell biology and signalling systems of plants. An insurgent school of botanists have coined the phrase plant neurobiology to describe a new field that is “aimed at understanding how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion.” Neurobiologists credit plants not only with powers of perception but also intelligence, learning and memory. Although controversial and disputed within botany, neurobiologists have inspired some moral philosophers to argue for a revised view of the moral status of plants. By questioning the chasm of moral inferiority that has long been thought to separate plants from animals, philosophers inspired by plant neurobiology are predictably viewed as providing a justification for meat-eating. Plant neurobiology is effective in showing that the traditional image of plants as “inert, vacant, raw materials” is outdated. But challenging protectionism’s ban on eating animals requires showing that plants possess equal moral status to animals. It also needs to be shown that in a world of sentient plants, the diet that would harm the fewest sentient beings is some form of omnivorism. The plant thinking view fails to establish either claim.

A popular view holds that no wrong is done to an animal when it is killed painlessly. In arguing against this view in the previous chapter, I granted for the sake of argument that chickens are merely sentient. I framed the discussion this way to make clear that the case against anti-speciesist versions of humane slaughter does not depend on revisionary claims about the cognitive abilities of food animals. Contemporary science, however, suggests that the cognitive abilities of chickens are more extensive than is generally recognized, to the point that they possess a primitive form of self-consciousness. If chickens have mental abilities that place them in an intermediate status between merely sentient beings and persons, this will have bearing not only on the arguments I examined in the last chapter, but on any attempt to justify slaughtering them, including attempts that employ Singer’s or potentially other versions of protectionist theory. The revised understanding of chicken cognition thus poses a separate challenge to protectionist arguments for humane slaughter, independent of the challenge posed by the time-relative interest account. The version of primitive self-consciousness that I defend innovates on previous versions to include a primitive ability to conceive of oneself through time.

This chapter analyzes the ethics of killing animals when animals are assumed to be unable to form desires about the future and to lack a conception of themselves through time. Even if their mental abilities are so limited, they can still be harmed by being killed, and so inducing their deaths will require justification. My argument employs the notion of a time-relative interest, which is the interest an entity has in continuing to live. This interest is shaped by two factors: the gain or loss of future well-being, and the amount of psychological continuity between the entity now and in the future (when its well-being improves or declines). After outlining the time-relative interest account I note how it differs from another influential argument that takes future well-being into account, Don Marquis’ argument against abortion. I then defend the time-relative interest account from the criticism that it fails to grant weight to interests a deceased individual would have come to posses had he or she not died. Finally, I show why my view is consistent with a universal legal ban on infanticide.

Animal rights and related notions of animal protection have long been thought to entail a plant-based diet. An increasingly popular view in the animal ethics debate challenges this idea by arguing that even if animals warrant a high degree of moral standing we are permitted or even obliged to eat meat. Some arguments to this effect maintain that greater harms accrue to animal in plant agriculture than in certain forms of free-range animal husbandry. Others cite a loss in value that would occur if animals raised for food no longer existed. Still other arguments for ethical omnivorism cite new technologies such as humane slaughter systems, which are said to painlessly kill animals in a manner consistent with Peter Singer's philosophy of animal liberation, or in vitro meat, which is sourced in a petri dish rather than the body of a living animal. Finally some philosophers invoke plant "neurobiology" to challenge the possibility of not eating sentient beings. Despite their differences these arguments all defend a new omnivorism, one that justifies eating meat within a framework of animal protection.